How America's Terrible Economy May Be Ruining Your Love Life

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/how-americas-terrible-economy-may-be-ruining-your-love-life



Finding true love, philosophers have always understood, can get complicated in deeply unequal places. Grand fortunes tend to give Cupid a hard time, on Valentine’s Day and every other.

“If you gain fame, power, or wealth, you won’t have any trouble finding lovers,” as Philip Slater noted years ago in The Pursuit of Loneliness, “but they will be people who love fame, power, or wealth.”

But philosophers no longer have a corner on the love-and-inequality connection. All sorts of social scientists are now working that intersection where wealth and romance meet — and they’re uncovering an assortment of troubling trends.

Researchers are finding, for instance, that Cupid’s arrows fall less randomly than they did back in the middle of the 20th century. Americans today have become distinctly less likely to marry someone outside their income bracket.